Hasta La Gadget!

If all goes well, this 25-megawatt solar plant in Florida won’t be America’s largest for long, but it’s not like we’d pass up the opportunity to let this $150 million facility bask in its own glory (and the sun, if we’re being thorough) while it can. The Desoto facility is just one of three solar projects that Florida Power & Light is spearheading, and judging by the proximity of this one (in Arcadia) to the 75-megawatt facility planned for nearby Charlotte County, we’d surmise that the two are linked in some form or fashion. President Obama is expected to show up rocking a set of Kanye glasses underneath a welder’s mask when the plant is fired up this Tuesday, and while it’ll only provide power to “a fraction” of FP&L’s customer base, it’ll still generate around twice as much energy as the second-largest photovoltaic facility in the US of A.

[Thanks, Yossi]

America’s (newest) largest solar plant set to go live in Florida originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There will always be paper books for die-hard romantics like my friend Jimmy, who actually smells a volume before he reads it and then, when done, can sit for hours in almost-darkness, stroking his calloused poet’s fingers across the smooth wood-pulp and dreaming of the good-old days of cotton paper and cow-skin covers.

But for more normal people, the technology that we use to read books in the near future will be based on silicon, not cellulose, and the e-book market is heating up. One of the big benefits of e-paper is that it sips electricity allowing devices to work for days rather than hours. LG’s foray into the e-book world extends this with a solar panel, helpfully placed on the front inside cover of the reader itself, and at just ten grams and less than a millimeter thick, it will be almost unnoticeable.

If exposed to the sun for five hours, the TFT solar panel will give enough charge for a day of use. LG plans to up the efficiency and we can see a time when e-books will never need to be charged. Remember the first solar-powered calculators? They were a novelty which is now ubiquitous. And e-books are especially well suited to solar power, as they need to be read in a bright place and few of us want to recharge our books.

When, or even if, this prototype will go on sale is unknown. But it doesn’t matter. Somebody, somewhere, will make one soon enough.

Solar Cell e-Book from LG Display [OLED Display]

See Also:

• Kindle Goes International — With a Little Help From AT&T
  
• World's First Color E-Book Reader Goes on Sale
• Sony's E-Book Reader Adds Touchscreen, Wireless Downloads
• Buying Guide: How to Choose an E-Book Reader

With eco-friendliness on everyone’s mind, it’s no shock to see more and more progress being made in the realm of solar. Shortly after hearing that boffins across the way were swapping carbon nanotubes for silicon, a Tel Aviv-based startup is now hoping to push its colored panels into the mainstream thanks to their ability to work sans direct sunlight. Granted, the tinted cells have only shown a 12 percent efficiency rate in testing, but they can reportedly be produced for around half of what a conventional panel costs. In essence, the cost savings comes from the dearth of silicon within, as GreenSun Energy has discovered that power can be generated by simply diffusing available sunlight over the whole panel and allowing nanoparticles to handle the rest. We’ll invite you to visit the links below for the science behind it, but we’re just interested in helping Ma Earth while replacing every windows in our apartment with a stained glass alternative.

[Via Inhabitat]

Filed under: Science

Colored solar panels work without direct sunlight, double as PAR Can filters originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know what we love? Solar-powered gadgets, and carbon nanotubes. Oh, and Ivy League schools. Boffins from Cornell University are now looking to use the multifaceted carbon nanotube instead of silicon to develop efficient solar cells, and judging by the glacial pace at which solar cell efficiency is improving, we’d say the sector could use the boost. The researchers have already fabricated, tested and measured a simple solar cell (called a photodiode, just so you know) that was formed from an individual carbon nanotube. The tube was essentially a rolled-up sheet of graphene, and while the inner workings would take days to explain, the gist of it is this:

“The nanotube may be a nearly ideal photovoltaic cell because it allowed electrons to create more electrons by utilizing the spare energy from the light.”

So, solar-powered F-350 trucks are now a possibility for next year, right?

[Via Graphene-Info]

Filed under: Science

Cornell gurus look to carbon nanotubes for efficient solar cells originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So we’ve been playing with the Devotec Industries Solar Sound Bluetooth speaker system for a couple days now, and we’ve got to say we’re pretty impressed — we just wish it could run directly (and indefinitely) off the solar panel, instead of requiring an internal battery that takes 12-24 hours to charge from the sun or four hours to charge off USB. That said, you will get eight hours of decent audio when the battery is full, and it’s actually relatively loud — you’ll be more than fine indoors and in quieter spots, although cranking things up all the way results in some audible distortion. Of course, it’s A2DP, so setup is a breeze with most Bluetooth devices, including 3.0 iPhones, and you can hook most everything else up with the included 3.5mm headphone cable. (Just keep in mind that Apple doesn’t properly support AVRCP, so the forward and back control buttons don’t work correctly over Bluetooth.) Not bad for $79 — and you won’t have to burn through endless AAs to take your tunes on those summer picnics and beach trips.

Filed under: Portable Audio

Devotec Solar Sound Bluetooth speaker hands-on and nano-review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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